“A grey-haired man holds the other. It is the soldier of the Rappahannock. Lee’s battery boy of ’63 is the trusted physician, the medical confidant, and ministrant of the Union soldier. With all the knowledge of a learned and skillful physician, he has fought the common enemy for the life of his dying friend. But the odds are too great. Old pains, old ailments, old wounds of ’63 outmatch the medical arts of 1904. But the doctor has known the grief of defeat before. Once a long time ago he yielded to the inevitable in the orchards of Appomattox. He lays his ear close over the failing heart to catch, if he can, its last lingering drum-beats in the battle of life. He places his fingers on the pulseless wrist, searching for its last faint throb—and they rest motionless for a moment on the old scar of ’63. ‘It is over,’ he says very softly. “A low word of prayer for the widow and fatherless falls from the lips of the grey-haired minister at the foot of the bed. It is the ‘boy chaplain’ of the dead veteran’s old brigade—youthful to the end. Another man beside him, thin-visaged and bent. It is Ashby’s old trooper, and his eyes are full of tears as he walks slowly out of the room. “‘Lights out.’ ‘The bands in the pine woods cease. A robin sings close by, as they will in summer evenings; the fragrance of old-fashioned flowers steals in through the white window curtains. The sun sinks behind the church across the street, the shadow of its belfry coming in at the open door. And over all, Lincoln’s worn face looks down from its place among the pictures on the wall. Even now with the hush of death upon us all, we hear his plaintive prophecy of long ago: ‘We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it cannot break the bonds of our affection. The mystic chord of memory, stretching from every patriot grave and battlefield to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when touched again, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.’” End of Project Gutenberg's The Experiences of Uncle Jack, by W. Ed. Snyder